


what brought us here will lead us away

by templemarker



Category: Beautiful Creatures (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:22:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/templemarker/pseuds/templemarker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lena is a strong person by necessity, and by birth, but lord does she feel weak sometimes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what brought us here will lead us away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).



> Yay! This was a great prompt and a lot of fun to write. This story relies entirely on the film narrative, as per the recipient's request; book fans, please be gentle. 
> 
> Takes place in a slight AU from the film's ending: Ethan doesn't remember everything when he sees the burned-out town sign. He just gets a twinge, but they keep going to New York and eventually he attends NYU. 
> 
> Happy holidays, scorpiod! I hope you enjoy this. 
> 
> Thanks so much to my go-to girl.

Lena is a strong person. Not being a Caster, or not just that anyway. She's a strong person because she's had to be, to grow up a Duchannes, to survive her mother. To bear the weight of her birthright and her destiny. She's made herself strong because weakness didn't mean death, it meant ceding control, and that was simply not going to happen. 

She is a strong person by necessity, and by birth, but lord does she feel weak sometimes. 

She expects everyone feels that way sometimes, whether they're sixteen-year-old girls or not, but it's not something that can be talked about in her family; her mother, rest her wicked soul, wouldn't tolerate idle discussion. Her cousin was a confidant before Lena had any real secrets to tell, and though they still love each other, it's through a dark glass and a heavy wall. 

So when she feels weak, she keeps it to herself, goes and hides in the library beneath the library with a slice of chess pie and one of those little boxes of wine that always seem to be in the pantry. If she's lucky, she can burn it off singing Patti Smith and Pink songs, dancing on the black and white tiles, go back to school the next day and pull herself together enough to solve the problem on the board in calculus. 

If that doesn't work, well. There's not a whole lot of supervision on her, and even if there were she's too damn strong to let it get in her way. 

It's easy enough to slip on the bus to Greenville, her magic making her look like another poor runaway who doesn't want to be bothered. She picks up the Amtrak all the way to Penn Station, slipping off and out in the space of a breath. There's gotta be some way to get here faster, but she doesn't know it, not willing to risk messing up a spell or drawing attention to herself anyhow.

She knows where Ethan is. She doesn't really know how, and she definitely doesn't want to explore it; it's bad enough that she's already come up here before, Juliet mourning without actually dying. He has a crummy little apartment he shares with four other boys, artists and musicians and writers. Lena goes there on autopilot, some beat of her heart chiming in that direction. She takes the subway, doesn't even know which one it is, but she knows it will take her to him. 

Crouching on the fire escape, one that will not likely survive a fire, she hides half in shadow, half in a tiny breath of magic that keeps casual eyes from seeing her. Ethan is there, his bed shoved up in a corner of the open space, cheap bookshelves and a strung-up sheet giving him privacy. He has a beat-up desk, the leg propped up with some old paperbacks. He's leaning back in his chair, feet crossed, glasses angled on his forehead while he stares at the ceiling. She imagines that he's writing an essay, or thinking up an article for the NYU newspaper. His byline on the first review he wrote is sitting in a paper box under her bed. 

He looks good. He always looks good to her, but tonight he has a little smile on his face, looking up at his crumbling ceiling. She wishes she knew what he was thinking about. She's glad she doesn't. 

Lena watches him until Link comes in, wearing a scarf too long for him and John Lennon glasses, throwing rolled up pieces of paper at Ethan. Ethan gives in, hands raised defensively, but he is smiling and laughing when he grabs his coat and one of Link's hats. 

She sits curled up on the fire escape, until finally she notices that her fingers are stiff and her breath is stuttering out of her. She unfolds, carefully, and slowly picks her way back to Manhattan and back to Gatlin, back to whatever pieces of her life remain. 

∞

Lena makes it six months this time. She heard from Amma that Ethan wasn't coming home for spring break, that he was staying in New York while all his buddies went to the Gulf. 

She felt something choking the back of her throat, had mumbled something under Amma's knowing stare, leaving the books she was shelving in a sloppy pile and slipping out the library. 

She almost ran to the bus station, but made herself slow down; she didn't want anything that would put attention on her, not now. She packed a bag instead, knowing she could get away with more without people near Ethan, and caught the bus in time to board the sleeper train to New York. 

When she arrived it was a piercingly sunny morning, and the sound of the city swallowed her. She followed her path towards the subway and Ethan's apartment, but there was a tug in her blood and Ethan's name on her lips. She turned and went north, walking to stretch her muscles and breathe unrecycled air. 

Central Park was busy, kids laughing and screaming, parents chasing them down. She walked through the park, letting her feet take her where she needed to be. 

On a bench under a tree, Ethan was there. He was horizontal on the bench, one foot crossed over a bent knee, book held up in front of his face. She bit her lip; he'd changed his glasses, and she felt some ache in her heart that she didn't know what had happened to them. 

She carefully edged around him, staying far enough back that he wouldn't catch the edge of her in his periphery. With a brief breath and an outstretched hand, she jumped up into a tree, and peered through the branches to look at him. 

He was reading a book of poetry by an author she hadn't heard of. _Louise Gluck_. She fished out a pen and wrote it on her palm, determined to look it up when she got back to the library. His fingers hovered over the page, hesitating before turning it like he was reading the lines over and over again. The sun hit him, illuminating his skin, and she was reminded of the days they'd spend in the gardens, no one there but them. 

She followed him for a week, watching him do his laundry and watch the Simpsons and wander through the Whitney Gallery with a look of awe on his face. She only managed to make herself leave when she knew she was going to do something stupid, like re-introduce herself to the boy whose life was in peril because of her, who didn't remember her as anything but that girl in writing class. 

∞

The next time felt worse than all the others combined, drinking watery tea at Dean and Deluca and watching him sip his espresso slowly, like he was making himself learn how to like it. He flirted with one of the servers, like he'd been doing that a lot, and Lena wanted to throw up. She also wanted to nudge him towards her, put memories of South Carolina and broken hearts behind him. 

Her hand shook when she lowered the mug to its saucer, and she flinched when it clattered. Ethan and half a dozen other people looked her way curiously, but she angled her body towards the pasta aisle and clasped her hands together in her lap. 

This had to stop. 

∞

Lena was strong, but this made her weak. It wasn't Ethan; it was her own self-discipline, her love and her sorrow mingling into something that just broke her heart into smaller and smaller pieces. 

She went again; she was barely passing her writing class this semester, and the teacher had already taken her aside to ask about troubles at home. Lena had just smiled crookedly and brushed her fingers counter-clockwise, making her white lie more convincing. 

This had to be it, the last one. 

Ethan went to a movie, something in French with subtitles. It made her laugh a little: he was being kind of a stereotype, but she didn't know what she'd be like her first year at college. If she went to college. 

Lena sat five rows behind him, watching his head rest on his fist, watching him move in his seat. Looking at the short hair at the back of his head and the slight curl that never went away even when it was cut short. 

Ethan started to twitch, shrug a little bit like he was cold in the theater. Lena watched him, but sunk a little bit lower in her seat. The people on the screen were making eyes at one another, and the girl with the blue hair reached out and ran her fingers down the other girl's arm. Ethan shuddered, and Lena felt it too, her body shuddering in response to Ethan, the girls on the screen, to what she was doing and the knowledge of why. 

Ethan turned around and started scanning the mostly empty theater, like he was looking for someone. Like he was looking for her. She swallowed a sound--had he been feeling that she was there? Did he feel like he'd been watched, did he see some piece of her that she thought she'd hidden?

When he turned around to the screen, Lena carefully stood, making sure the seat wouldn't squeak, and started walking fast out of the theater. She was in the lobby, her hands shoved into the pockets of her hoodie and her backpack slung over one shoulder when she heard him cry out, "Hey!"

She started walking faster, looking straight ahead, and she'd almost made it to the exit when Ethan caught her elbow, tugging her around. 

Lena met his eyes, and the tug in her blood subsumed her. Her whole body felt electric, shocky at the points where his fingertips were on her arm. 

Ethan smiled, that sweet, happy smile that had stolen her heart in the first place, and he said, "Hey--hey. Do I know you?" His brow furrowed. "Le--" he got out. 

She cut him off. "No," she said, a glamour pulled up over her to confuse him and change her face just enough. "No, I don't know you. I was just sitting behind you in the theater when my phone started buzzing; my lab alert went off." Lena was shocked at herself, that she could lie so quickly, and so well. But she kept her face neutral, and after a moment Ethan shook off his confusion, and smiled again. 

"Oh," he said, and dropped his hand. 

She felt cold again, cold she'd never realized she carried with her. 

"Sorry about that," he said, taking a step back, nodding towards the theater. "I'm going to go back in."

She shrugged, turned towards the exit. At the ticket-taker stand, she snuck a look back, watching him walk away. She ground her palm into her eyes, and said harshy, "That's it. This is the last. No more."

Lena wiped her eyes on her sleeve, raised her head, and started heading home. Gatlin was it. She was setting a boundary on herself, and she would mend her heart and move on if it killed her. 

∞

She didn't notice the boy following her out of the theater, thumbs in the loops of his jeans, with a funny, curious look on his face.


End file.
